Recently I sustained an injury which out me put me out of training my whole lower body for a while. Actually, at the time of writing this, my foot is still elevated to take pressure of it.
Damn ankle roll!
This means I’ll have a reduction in activity for the next few weeks to allow the body time to heal.
So what does this mean for my nutrition and how should you handle yours when you’re injured?
A good place to start is with your protein, especially if you have done some damage to skeletal muscle. Straight away it’s a great idea to raise your protein levels to around 0.7-1.2g/lb of your bodyweight.
Why?
Well, protein is very important for day-to-day recovery and building of muscle tissue, and when you are injured its no different. Not only will it help to maintain the muscle mass that you could potentially lose from being slightly detrained, but it will also help to rebuild and strengthen the damaged muscle.
Next on the list will be to assess your calorie intake and probably aim for the lower end of what you think you should be eating. An easy way to do this is to take your body weight in pounds and multiply it by 10.
For me, 180lbs X 10 = 1800 calories.
Simple and no fuss needed.
The reason for this is that your energy expenditure is going to be much lower whilst you’re injured and to avoid an excessive gain in body fat, its probably best to edge calories down to the lower side.
Other than that, you wont need to change much else. Sure we could go into discussions about micronutrients that “potentially” help to reduce inflammation etc etc. But its best to fry the big fish first.
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